Tax wrote:Keep in mind PHP is free vs .NET that isn't.
/bonk
The .NET framework is entirely free. True, visual studio costs 3 grand, but there's alternate IDE's built for .NET that are not only free, but almost as good as VS and even sanctioned by microsoft. You could do all of your web apps in notepad if you wanted, but there's entire movements for development in .NET geared towards not paying MS anything, and again, MS is cool with it.
This is the best asp .net development site, and the free IDE is right there on the front page:
As to the original question - holy crap! They're teaching TABLES for layout? That's completely fucked up. CSS is way, way better than tables at layout and you can rework the entire site just by messing with the stylesheet rather than having to recode your table layout.
(Hint: This board is done with CSS - no tables at all)
Also, when playing with CSS make sure you have Firefox and the FireBug and Web Developer extensions that let you play with the CSS on the fly as well as seeing exactly which CSS tags apply to which visual element.
For general site layout I get it. But for for dynamic content I don't see why tables are so evil since there's no HTML to go back and rework if you want to change the look. But for static HTML, sure.
I just looked at the output from the Microsft GridView control and it does its layout with tables, though the colors and whatnot come from the style sheet.
pooltest.jpg
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Oh - tables are fine when you're actually trying to do a table, but for a general layout mechanism you're much better using div/span and setting positioning using css.
Freecare Spiritwise wrote:OOP has been around several decades and it still scares people. It's not intuitive and about half the people who try to master it give up in frustration. But once it clicks, it's almost a religious experience. Encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. Know them, live them, love them.
I remember getting that feeling when recursion sunk in as well.
I meant that .NET isn't free in the sense that you need (or so I thought, apparently apache is able to support .NET as well) IIS and Visual Studio. PHP/Apache is so much easier (IMO) to get set up and running. Keep in mind I've done about 10 big projects using PHP and am still working on my first .NET project. It's probably just an experience (or lack of) thing.
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Apache/Mono isn't really a great replacement for IIS, and you're right - you do need a Windows Server to run things on. Given the productivity increase of .NET though, it's hardly a cost factor worth considering.
Your reduced development and maintenance will more than make up for what the tools cost. And I can usually take a server box and have windows server and SQL server on it running database driven web applications in a few hours. Maybe LAMP doesn't take as long to install because it's a smaller footprint, but Windows aint exactly hard to setup.
And yeah, recusion is nifty. It's not something people generally use a lot, but I've seen guys write 2000 lines of code to do something that you could do recursively with 10 lines. I pretty much only use it for iterating through directory structures and xml documents, but it's a powerful tool, and most people can't wrap their brain around it.
Hmmm I'm not sure that anyone answered Klast's question of how you learn this stuff.
I'm self taught and I've mainly just dissected other people's work. Even in the circa 1980's era, with BBSs I could get my hands on sample code. At least for developers, I've known many who seem to make their entire career just modifying sample code.
For HTML at least there's about a billion web sites to dissect.
And for keeping your self education focused, do what a lot of the tutorial books do: Invent an imaginary company with imaginary needs and build a project. Your self tutorial could be to build a web site for a hair salon, and maybe the clients want to make appointments online. They might ask you for online payment processing.
The best way to learn is by doing something real world, and short of that, simulating something real world IMHO.
Teaching yourself network engineering is much harder only because where you could get a pirated copy of visual studio to learn on, you're not likely to have access to a rack of servers to play with, though you could certainly chip away at buying lots of hardware.
I have two very successful friends who have a lot in common: When we were kids, one spent every dime he ever earned on mechanic's tools. As his knowledge grew, he made more money, and bought more tools, and somewhere he hit a critical mass where he was buying pieces of equipement that cost 100 grand. My other friend spent every dime he ever made on computer equipment. Wasn't long before friends, neighbors and family started bringing their computers to him because he could pull a video card out of a huge pile and have you on your way in 10 minutes. Same thing as the mechanic - his projects just kept getting bigger and bigger and now he's doing call centers for large seedy collection agencies that have to pack up and move every couple of months. He can setup a massive network from scratch in no time and it'll work as advertised 100% of the time.
I just saved all the hassle and went into software. The things I collect are just bits. It's very clean, I never almost accidentally saw my arm off, and I can do my job from anywhere, where the mechanic has to have access to your car, and the network engineer has to have physical access to your network, at least a good deal of the time.
Freecare Spiritwise wrote:Hmmm I'm not sure that anyone answered Klast's question of how you learn this stuff.
I haven't been to the site in years, but I loved webmonkey.com when I first started making .html pages and such. They had an ton of good tutorials on pretty much everything.
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Also, these presentation languages like HTML and transfer protocols like HTTP all have publicly available specifications. If you understand the spec for the thing, you understand the thing.
When I was first learning internet programming, I'd take the RFC's for protocols like FTP and SMTP and I'd write file servers and email servers just based on the specs. Then I'd test those servers with programs like Outlook and freeware FTP clients.
So once you can create something from scratch that conforms to the specs, then you understand the specs. I've never read the one for (X)HTML but I've always wanted to, and certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert until I knew the spec front to back.
Here's the master list of RFC's too. Network engineers are expected to be experts in at least the common protocols, and software developers should know the ones they're working with. Certainly if I'm sitting down to write an email server, it'll need to conform to the specs or nobody will use it.
A network administrator would need to configure an email server, where a network engineer should know how it works even if he couldn't build one. But a good network guy will know if I wrote a good email server.
So if you are a serious internet geek, you should at least spend a few months (or years) reading as many of these as possible.
I swear I'm going to bring a gun to school pretty soon. I did half that table with style sheets and Tax gave me the other half of the stile sheets to finish the job.
I come in to class and find out that they want us to do it all without styles at all. The teacher showed us some sample code she put together and she had width, centering, font and border tags inside each and every <td></td> of a 5x5 table. Her code ran for pages and pages. All full of code duplicated over and over for every element. And now I have to tear my table apart and rebuild it using her method because the class is not going to cover style sheets for a few weeks. In the mean time please learn the old wrong way of doing it.
AAARRRRGGGHHHHHH
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Klast Brell wrote:The teacher showed us some sample code she put together and she had width, centering, font and border tags inside each and every <td></td> of a 5x5 table
That sounds pretty standard though. School = tedious learning of antiquated methods until you get higher up.
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Yeah, not much you can do about that. That huge disconnect has been around as long as I've been in IT. And there's lots of companies out there that want you to do stuff that's antiquated too.
I've been really super careful with my career about only taking jobs on the cutting edge, and I've turned down jobs for that reason. If you want to do 1980's COBOL or 1990's ASP, I'm not your guy. I'll make small exceptions like interfacing to ancient systems, but every day for the last 15 years I've sat down to do my job in front of the lastest version of Visual Studio, and the latest versions of Borland Turbo C/C++ before that. I'll live in a dingy apartment and go to culinary school before I'll pick up a DOS COBOL compiler, seriously.
since the teacher is useless and going off a curriculum someone else wrote I'm turning to the experts here once again.
I redid the assignment using straight HTML. When the teachers dropped the requirements that the border colors be changed AND told us we were not allowed to use style sheets I just had to delete the style section and add a few things to a lot of places. A lot of find and replace. A lot of copy paste.
One of the things they are asking us to do is use align tags. The table we are supposed to recreate has all the text in the center of the cells. When I put the text in the cells and look at the table the text already appears centered even though I have not yet put in the align attribute. Is there a good reason to use the align attribute anyway? Like will it prevent the text from moving to the sides if something else happens?
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Is there a good reason to use the align attribute anyway? Like will it prevent the text from moving to the sides if something else happens?
There's a reason, but not a very good one. The text formatting should inherit the style from its parents up the chain, so if the table is in a text block with centered text then the text inside the table should be centered as well (absent any stylesheets modifying the table itself, of course). That means if you put the style explicitly on each <td> then you're definitely going to have centered text no matter where you drop the table in your html.
Of course, if you were actually using stylesheets then you'd avoid that sort of thing like the plague because you WANT to be able to override things in the stylesheet!
I'm doing an installation guide for a large insurance company and there's several third party toolkits that our projects depend on. I had put "Launch the toolkit installer and keep pressing the Next > button until it's installed."
Nope, those instructions were "sketchy", so I'm having to make a dozen screen shots for each toolkit, and each screen shot has the instruction "When you see this screen, press the Next > button."
Jesus I hate technical documentation - again, the short straw lol. I guess the client is paying by the hour, but still there's only about 10 other projects I should be working on.
